In about 20 years I might be able to pay back my student loan ... Ben Wishaw and Matthew Goode in Brideshead Revisited

This week I have been trying to make sense of Brideshead Revisited, a movie revival of Evelyn Waugh's famous 1945 novel. It's all very English Heritage: but what exactly is the inheritance? Why are we asking the family solicitor to get these dusty jewels out of the bank vault?

There seems to be no real reason for re-introducing these exquisite butterflies back into our lives, and I felt about as moved by Matthew Goode and Ben Whishaw in the personae of Charles and Sebastian, as I did by Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson reviving the roles of Starsky and Hutch - a movie which was premised on approximately the same complacent nostalgia.

(Just as David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser returned as old car-dealing geezers, incidentally, Jeremy Irons was reportedly offered the role of Lord Marchmain: a role he turned down, perhaps because he was still not ready to die of old age on screen, or perhaps he rightly felt that the ancestor-worship of the legendary 1981 TV version by Charles Sturridge would therefore be a little too much.)

But so far the movie has had a powerful effect on everyone who has seen it: it has returned us, not to the original novel, but that remarkable television adaptation, an adaptation which secured Brideshead's reputation as Waugh's masterpiece. Everyone has gone swooning back to the early Eighties when this first went on the air, so powerful, so distinctive, it is easy to think of the TV programme as the original text.

Christopher Hitchens has recently written here about the film's infelicities but does not, in fact, include a telling touch that he first reported in his 1990 book Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies, about the Special Relationship, that neo-con thinkers of this Reaganite age were deeply in thrall to Brideshead and one of them, Benjamin Hart, associated with a think-tank called The Heritage Foundation, nakedly pinched passages from the book in the service of his haughty repudiation of modern educational values. Furthermore, the Reaganites had to admit, sheepishly, that they were thinking of the TV show, rather than the book.

Everyone loved it - that, and the much lower-minded Tom Sharpe comedy Porterhouse Blue that came a few years later. A whole generation of appalling 80s Oxbridge hoorays, culminating in the Bullingdon Club of David Cameron and Boris Johnson, found in it a manifesto for escapist self-love and this came down to the fact that it was a fantasy that was affordable.

Everyone was on grants. Brideshead Revisited was the Full Grant Fantasy Epic, as redolent of the 80s as Beverly Hills Cop. The awful truth was that the predominantly middle-class strivers of 80s Oxbridge were often financially as well off, or perhaps even better off in ready cash terms, than Sebastian and Charles were in the 20s - during university term-time at any rate. Their income was regular, independent of family whim, guaranteed by the state and fees were paid off at source.

That excruciatingly embarrassing group picture of the 1987 Bullingdon Club (Evelyn Waugh called it the "Bollinger" in Decline And Fall) featuring David, Boris et al, striking silly poses, is essentially a picture of tragic middle-class wish-fulfilment.

They and others of similar interests could wear silly tail-coats or other accoutrements and get drunk at local restaurants, and when the vac came - well, it was not a question of motoring to Brideshead, or even to Charles's picturesque and elegant world of loneliness, but in most cases a National Express coach to a nice house in the suburbs, and the stable, uncool family which underpinned the aspirational, exam-passing commitment that got you to the dreaming spires in the first place.

Those going up to university in a couple of weeks do so in a different financial age. Very different. Selling them the languid indulgence of Charles and Sebastian might be tough.